How much great music is falling through the gaps? This guide is about cutting through the morass enough to get your bearings. And most important, it's about songs. Good ones.

Your friend mentions a band he stumbled upon on MySpace. Or maybe you heard them on NPR. If you like iTunes' thirty-second free sample, you can immediately purchase it and their other stuff. (Or get it for free.) And their other other stuff. And their other other other stuff. Outtakes. Acoustic versions. The artists' home demos. Target's or Best Buy's exclusive versions. Whole live shows recorded by fanboys in the third row with state-of-the-art recording equipment. Music blogs--many of which are better at what they do than most music magazines--can get you as up to speed about the band or the music industry generally as a low-level record-label staffer. You can see the band at one of a handful of music festivals with mind-bogglingly great lineups--for really cheap. Thanks to camera phones, by the time you get home, you can relive the show from five different angles on YouTube.

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The sublime problem is this: The music world would be a wonderful place if it weren't for all the noise. That's not to say dissonance. It's not discordant--unless you're into that sort of thing. It's just a Lot of Sound. The Age of Everything. How much great music is falling through the gaps? This guide--largely the efforts of our music critic Andy Langer--is about cutting through the morass enough to get your bearings. And most important, it's about songs. Good ones.

Nobody--not Radiohead, not U2--creates live shows as consistently transcendent. Onstage, the gloomy discontent of these hirsute Kentucky misfits' records is reenergized. Okonokos, last year's live double album and DVD and the band's masterwork, takes us on a journey into what we can only hope is the very future of live performance--where the real show lies in the nuances of musicianship, not the exaggerated spectacle.

British rap is itself an acquired taste. (See: the Streets and/or Dizzee Rascal.) And she'd likely have been too bratty to have lasted three episodes on VH1's (White) Rapper Show. But the self-proclaimed "biggest midget in the game" is hip-hop's most animated character since Flavor Flav. She's cocky yet self-effacing, witty but still just a little scary. Most of all, we like that she's William Safire's worst nightmare: Her debut, Public Warning, pushes the boundaries of English, piling cockney slang upon outright gibberish.

Best MC

Ghostface Killah

Hip-hop fans love arguing over lists and awards, but never has it been this easy to single out the best MC of the moment. Elaborately detailed storytelling. Mind-boggling wordplay. Razor-sharp production. And an instantly distinct delivery. The Wu-Tang alumnus earned his bona fides twice last year, with Fishscale and its almost instant follow-up, More Fish, a starkly cinematic depiction of the drug trade. His ability to seamlessly move from precise narratives to stream-of-consciousness rants is unparalleled.

Ben Kweller looks like he just rolled off the tour bus into the front row of a Fashion Week showcase. And while we wouldn't know exactly how to pull off crumpled corduroy, tight jeans, funky ties, and dime-store handkerchiefs, Kweller wears it well; there aren't many rock stars who could make one outfit work for both the paparazzi at Hyde and the hipster cognoscenti at Spaceland.

Until recently, the easiest shorthand for describing Albert Hammond Jr. has been as "the sharp-dressed, hirsute guitarist for the Strokes." But his first solo record, Yours to Keep, suggests some redefinition is in order. Hammond has a voice so perfectly suited for knocking out jangly pop songs that it makes us wonder why he's even holding a guitar in the first place. Better still, when you cut through the fuzzy rattle of the album's best songs, there's no Strokesian irony underneath.

This Scottish sensation's American debuts have been a blur: At last year's SXSW festival in Texas, he got himself well acquainted with the local brews and left town with a souvenir--a trio of Lone Star beer logos tattooed on his forearm. Six months later, after an early-afternoon set at the Austin City Limits festival, we spotted him hurling his liquid breakfast backstage. It wasn't pretty, but even so, we'd make plans to see him on his next trip across the pond: His These Streets reveals a convincing voice and songs suggesting the intersection of late Otis Redding and early Elton John.

Most Prolific Poet

Papoose

In just short of a three-year bid, the Bed-Stuy-based MC has recorded more than three hundred songs and released seventeen mix tapes. By the time you finish this sentence, it'll probably be eighteen. All of them feature jaw-dropping similes and truly original boasts. His major-label debut is due any day now, but you can Google for free MP3's from the mix tapes.

From Cream to the Secret Machines, the hallmark of every great power trio has been a great drummer. And while plenty of drummers play fast, the best find new ways to fill space and add momentum while still playing for the sake of the song--a concept nobody understands better than the Athens, Georgia-based lo-fi college faves the Whigs. Onstage and on their debut, Give 'Em All a Big Fat Lip, Julian Dorio is the guy throwing the hardest punches.

Our crush on this Scottish singer-songwriter kicked in the moment we heard "Black Horse & the Cherry Tree." Her debut, Eye to the Telescope, offered more well-told tales. And the more popular she got, the more she carried herself like someone happy to be here, yet hell-bent on staying a while. And here's betting she will: Newcomers as rich in taste, composure, and respect for Tom Waits don't come around very often.

That's Best Group, not Best Jack White Side Project. That less than a year after their debut most of us think of the Raconteurs as a band, not a supergroup, speaks volumes. Sure, White's presence got us interested, but it was fellow Detroit troubadour Brendan Benson who made it work. Across their thirty-three-minute Broken Boy Soldiers, his lush sixties-style melodies brought elegance and balance; it winds up White's Zeppelin fetishism works best when set against bittersweet pop. Rarely does a young band gel this quickly, especially live: The band's Lollapalooza appearance (generously archived on YouTube) serves as a classic tutorial on how to bring the energy and intimacy of a small rock club to a stadium-sized crowd.

Craig Finn has been called indie rock's Kerouac and Brooklyn's answer to Bruce Springsteen a few hundred times too many for this to be a surprising pick. But the immaculately spun anthems, meditations, and travelogues on last year's list-topping Boys and Girls in America didn't simply put fuckups in fucked-up situations; they showed them compassion.

Putting aside all the blog hype they earned, there was very little newfangled about Cold War Kids' rise. They toured incessantly, tested the waters with a series of EPs each more compelling than the last, and then rolled the songs that worked into a stunning debut. Their Robbers and Cowards is artful yet intense: In setting bluesy barrelhouse piano against angular pop melodies, they've twisted the indie-rock formula just enough to be on their way to a genuinely fresh path. Plus, on record and onstage, frontman Nathan Willett has emerged as a singular talent; he's got the voice and affectation of a weird Tom Waits-Axl Rose hybrid.

Onstage, Cold War Kids bassist Matt Maust (above, far right) keeps time by beating up his bandmates. Hard. As the center-stage attraction, Nathan Willett's torso seems to take the brunt of the blows, but even on the songs on which he's sitting at the piano, we've seen him take a few whacks to the back of the head.

Here's how NAFTA could work for us all: a straight-up trade with Canada of one-named musical heartbreakers. We'll send Beyoncé to the land of health care and hockey and get Toronto's Feist in return. Every new spin of 2005's Let It Die--and last year's remix record, Open Season--suggests that with Feist we're getting the better deal: She's got a smoldering voice that's at once ethereal and unapologetically sensual.

He gave us a batch of goofy homemade videos for each song on The Information and an even goofier Letterman appearance in which he held his own against a dancing Borat. Then there was his stage show: Beginning at Bonnaroo, Beck renewed our faith in puppetry with a lifelike band of marionettes that shadowed the real band's every move.

Best Import

Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars

After fleeing rebel attacks in Sierra Leone, a group of musicians came together in a Guinea refugee camp, only to be discovered by an American film crew. After seeing the award-winning documentary about their plight, celebrities funded the band's safe passage to a professional recording studio and, eventually, a world tour. All this would be better fodder for Oprah than everyday music fans, if only their record, Living Like a Refugee, which combines traditional West African music and roots reggae, weren't so outright brilliant.

Manu Chao sings in French, Spanish, English, Arabic, and even Senegal's native tongue, Wolof. And musically, he's proven himself to be nothing short of Latin rock's answer to the Clash, the Police, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers--all in one gonzo package. Despite his multiplatinum success around the world, it's politics that keeps him away from the States. His distaste for G8 countries and George Bush is well documented. He's played just a handful of American dates over the past decade or so, most notably and most recently as a main-stage headliner at last summer's Lollapalooza. Here's hoping he wants to return.

Best Country Artist (And the Only Reason We'd Ever Go to a Brad Paisley Show)

Jack Ingram

Brooks & Dunn, Sheryl Crow, and Brad Paisley have more balls than we thought: Each has tapped Jack Ingram as a tour opener, even though this gritty storyteller steeped in the tradition of Willie and Waylon is the last guy any of them should follow onstage. His new record, This Is It, is loaded with smartly spun sing-along anthems. Jack Ingram plays modern country music for people who don't know they love modern country music.

These days, real blues is easier to find in your paper's obituaries than its calendar section. Thank God, then, for Pinetop Perkins: At ninety-three, he's a legitimate piece of living history. He's paid rent playing live since 1926--most notably as a featured sideman with Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters. And amazingly, he's still on the road. He'll be in the Northwest in April, proving nightly that his trademark style--banging out horn lines with his right hand while churning out bass lines with his left--has lost very little of its swing.

"North American Scum," the block-rocking, prisoner-taking first single from LCD Soundsystem's new Sound of Silver, is the first genuinely monstrous sing-along of 2007. LCD mastermind James Murphy basically invented disco-punk, but never has he mustered this much intensity. That it sounds equally fit for the dance floor and your gym's elliptical is less surprising: The new record follows closely on the heels of "45:33," the forty-five-minute, thirty-three-second-long workout track commissioned by Nike and Apple.

After this Atlanta DJ and producer (and half of Gnarls Barkley) turned copyright law on its head with his Jay-Z-Beatles mash-up, The Grey Album, he landed legit gigs behind the knobs for Gorillaz, the Rapture, and Sparklehorse--coaxing best-of-career performances from each by keeping the grooves tight and the mood light. Truth is, if "Crazy" were the only line on his resume, we might have singled him out anyway. But it's not. This year's The Good, the Bad & the Queen--the album he produced for Gorillaz leader Damon Albarn--features his most majestic production effort yet.

In less than two years this Austin-based singer-songwriter--and son of literary legend Larry McMurtry--has served up a pair of the decade's most eloquently damning protest songs: "We Can't Make It Here" and "God Bless America." Touching on Iraq, Wal-Mart, energy, and immigration, these guitar-driven state-of-the-union addresses provide astute analysis yet seem every bit as timeless as Woody Guthrie or Steve Earle.